In ancient times, there were small communities of people who would select young goats from their herds, blame the goats for the sins of the people, and banish the goats to the wilderness to carry away these transgressions. The scapegoat, as it came to be known, is the bearer of responsibility, the one who is falsely blamed for transgressions.

It is an appealing concept that someone else can take the blame and burden for another, so much so that scapegoating has occurred throughout recorded history. Adam blamed Eve for partaking of the forbidden fruit. In Greek mythology, Pandora is responsible for opening the box that unleashed all human trouble. There seems to be a universal instinct to blame other people for our own actions. Scapegoating is as prevalent today as ever. We may not banish goats into the wilderness or sacrifice them on altars, but we do have a propensity to allocate blame. When things go wrong many people will say it was their colleague’s fault, or their subordinate’s fault, or their boss’s fault, or their customer’s fault. When someone else can be blamed, many people look to do that first.

Great SMEs resist the temptation to blame. They know that scapegoating is unbecoming of an expert. It diminishes credibility and corrodes trust. If an SME correctly blames someone nine times out of ten, the audience will still remember the one time when the SME assigned blame erroneously. Great SMEs take responsibility for errors. They assume a mistake was their own until they are completely certain that the problem lies someplace else. Even when a problem is not the SME’s responsibility, they do what they can to alleviate the burden on the responsible party. It is never enough to point a finger and walk away. Great SMEs quickly and accurately identify the real sources of problems and then cooperate in the solution. They know blaming never solves anything.